"Being a private eye may not be much, but we do have a code of honor. It's all right to fool around with your partner's wife, but once he's dead it makes it all so dirty. That's the way it is, angel. You marry yourself a nice guy, have a couple of swell kids. Once you're all set up and happy, maybe we can fool around again."

LOU PECKINPAUGH is The Cheap Detective, in Neil
Simon's film of the same name. A decent take-off on about a thousand
B-films, particularly The
Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, it's got enough eccentric characters and loopy plotlines (and a cast of thousands!) to stand up nicely beside some of its targets.

Peter Falk shines as Peckinpaugh, a poor gumshoe trying to find out who plugged his partner, while avoiding the advances of six different women. As the tagline puts it, "He knows every cheap trick, cheap joke, cheap shot and cheap dame in the book."

Fluff, but fun. It's a sort of follow-up to Simon's better-known
mystery satire, Murder
by Death (1976), which included Falk as similarly rumpled
P.I. Sam Diamond.

"Nice catch Mr Pekinpah, I was almost a widow!"
(Georgia Merkle, after trying to roll her wheelchair-bound
husband into a fireplace.).

Lou Peckinpaugh: Your husband's dead a little over
an hour and you're already dressed in black? How long you had
that outfit waiting in the closet? Georgia Merkle: You're wrong. I just bought it. There's
an all-night widow shop at Fifth and Geary. .

Lieutenant DiMaggio: Mind answering a few questions
downtown, Lou? Lou Peckinpaugh: We are downtown. Lieutenant DiMaggio: Then this will be fine.